American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  A Pew Research poll released late in the year confirmed this experiential and identity-driven disconnect. A full 80 percent of black respondents said that the grand jury had erred in failing to indict the officer who shot Brown, and 90 percent said the same of the officer who killed Garner. Among white respondents, those numbers were 23 percent and 47 percent, respectively.9

  Obama made a game attempt to split the baby, sensitive to the warring perceptions that he was either stoking racial divisions by empathizing with the struggles of the black community or turning his back on his heritage by touting the difficult, admirable work of law enforcement.

  It did little good. A Politico poll taken in the aftermath of the Ferguson unrest found that just 6 percent of voters in battleground states and congressional districts thought race relations had improved under the first black president, while 46 percent said they had gotten worse.10

  The Democratic Party was already bracing for a bruising midterm election. A polarizing president and a summer framed by racial and cultural friction weren’t helping their cause.

  EVEN BEFORE ELECTION DAY 2014, CONSERVATIVES HAD BEGUN LOOKING ahead to the 2016 presidential campaign.

  It was an article of faith on the right that the past two general elections had been lost not because of Obama’s popularity, but because Republicans had nominated moderate opponents who failed to mobilize the party’s base. This was the result of divided loyalties: In 2008, conservatives split their votes between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, allowing John McCain to win with plurality support; a similar dynamic played out in 2012, when Romney won the nomination thanks to prolonged divisions between Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. In truth, it seemed there was no pleasing the base; many conservatives had not been happy with the GOP’s presidential nominee since 1984.

  With 2016 approaching, and Jeb Bush making noise about raising unprecedented sums of campaign cash to clear the Republican primary field of potential challengers, leaders of the conservative movement agreed on an urgent priority: to coalesce behind a single candidate, as early as possible, to stand a chance of defeating the establishment.

  Spearheading this effort was Tony Perkins. A former Marine, police officer, and state lawmaker in Louisiana, Perkins was best known as president of the Family Research Council. But his more covert, more consequential title was as president of the Council for National Policy. Founded in 1981 as a rallying point for politically active Christian conservatives, CNP had evolved into a forward operating base for the entire conservative movement, an umbrella organization that housed the leaders of the biggest national and state-based activist groups on the right. Meeting in private three times each year, CNP’s invitation-only membership would host prominent guests to give lectures, legislative updates, and insights from Washington’s smoke-filled rooms.

  Perkins had long planned to use CNP to advance his pet cause. Setting out in 2013 to build a coalition of activist leaders who accepted his premise that defeating the establishment depended on the movement uniting behind one candidate before the primary season began, Perkins assembled a roster of heavyweights. His secretive sect, known simply as “The GROUP” on email chains, convened for the first time in New York City in August 2014. Previewing their objective, Perkins told his comrades that they would get a good look at their choices at the following month’s CNP summit in Atlanta.

  Sure enough, on back-to-back nights in September 2014, the titans of the conservative movement auditioned two leading men to be their champion in 2016: Cruz and Huckabee.

  Both delivered dynamo performances (speeches, followed by Q&A sessions) and both had deep support in the room. Huckabee had spent the past two years listening to friends, many of them CNP members, telling him that he would have won the nomination, and the White House, had he run in 2012. Hearing their pleas for him to enter the 2016 race, Huckabee was laying the groundwork for his second presidential bid.

  Cruz, meanwhile, had spent every waking moment since arriving in the Senate working methodically to forge alliances across the conservative movement—none more intimate than with Perkins himself. The senator, who lived a block from the posh Capital Grille in Washington, had a back-corner booth reserved almost every night of the week. He packed his dinner schedule with useful meetings: donors, think-tankers, lobbyists, House members, and activists. Perkins was his most frequent companion. Even though the CNP president had been one of the voices whispering in Huckabee’s ear to run, he was beginning to fall for the new kid in class.

  With all the bubbling excitement over the upcoming presidential season, the 2014 midterm elections went somewhat overlooked. And indeed, the results did not strike many Republicans as exceptionally consequential. Yes, Republicans expanded their majority in the House of Representatives. And yes, the GOP picked up 9 Senate seats and regained control of the upper chamber, making McConnell the new majority leader.

  Yet the core realities of divided government remained. Republicans could now pass bills, including the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, through both houses of Congress and send them to the president’s desk. But Obama still sat behind that desk. And there was no way to force his compliance with any of the GOP’s legislative priorities.

  As it turned out—shockingly—Republicans couldn’t agree on what those priorities should be.

  Conservative advocacy groups, for instance, pumped millions of dollars into Republican general election campaigns with the hope of abolishing the Export-Import Bank, a government agency that provides loan guarantees to foreign entities to ensure the purchase of U.S. goods. It was a niche cause that sought to make a symbolic point about the dangers of “crony capitalism.” But GOP leaders scoffed at the argument after Election Day.

  This infuriated right-wing activists and certain donors, particularly the Koch brothers, who spent more than $300 million on the 2014 election cycle and viewed the Export-Import fight as the least Republicans could do to bare their ideological fangs with total control of Congress.

  As the intraparty recriminations began anew, and the familiar grumbling grew louder, Republicans quickly put 2014 in the rearview and began focusing on the wide-open presidential campaign ahead. After eight years of being told what they couldn’t do because Obama occupied the Oval Office—and with the party establishment quickly rallying around its favorite dynastic son, Jeb Bush—conservatives viewed 2016 as their make-or-break year.

  It was impossible to understand, at that time, how the GOP Senate takeover of 2014 would alter the trajectory of American politics forever.

  Chapter Nine

  January 2015

  “I thought, ‘Well, that’s it. He’s finished.’”

  STUBBORN ISLANDS OF SNOW DOTTED THE LANDSCAPE OF DOWNTOWN Des Moines, a melting remnant of winter as balmy temperatures topping fifty degrees welcomed the presidential circus to Iowa.

  Saturday, January 24, marked the unofficial kickoff to the 2016 Republican primary: Congressman Steve King had partnered with Citizens United to host the “Iowa Freedom Summit,” a nine-hour buffet of rhetorical red meat flung to the caucus-going masses.

  Ten future presidential candidates would deliver speeches at the cattle call. Marco Rubio was not among them. Just as Jeff Sessions had known better than to pose for the cameras with Rubio during the immigration fight, Rubio could not stomach being photographed behind a lectern plastered with the name of King, the federal government’s most notorious race-baiter.

  Another potential heavyweight in the GOP field, Jeb Bush, skipped the shindig for similar reasons. Bush was married to a Mexican immigrant and felt personally offended by the party’s tone toward foreigners. Having gone further than perhaps any Republican in recent memory to destigmatize the issue—even saying that immigrants who entered U.S. illegally were committing “an act of love”1 for their families—Bush would not have found a welcome audience at King’s event.

  There was no such dilemma for Donald Trump.

  “We have to build a fence. And it’s got to be a beauty. Who can bui
ld better than Trump?” he told a delighted audience, a steady blend of laughter and applause filling the auditorium. “We don’t have the best coming in. We have people that are criminals, we have people that are crooks. You can certainly have terrorists. You can certainly have Islamic terrorists. You can have anything coming across the border. We don’t do anything about it. So, I would say that if I run and if I win, I would certainly start by building a very, very powerful border.”2

  It was a preview of what would become vintage Trump. There were digs at the GOP’s impotent governing class. (“Everything about Obamacare was a lie. It was a filthy lie. . . . And what are the Republican politicians doing about it?”) There were strange boasts. (“Our president is either grossly incompetent, a word that more and more people are using—and I think I was the first to use it—or he has a completely different agenda than you want to know about.”) There were paroxysms of populism. (“I’ll probably be the only Republican that does not want to cut Social Security. . . . Get rid of the waste, get rid of the fraud, but you deserve your Social Security.”)

  And of course, there were unsolicited attacks. “It can’t be Mitt because Mitt ran and failed,” Trump said of the 2012 nominee, who was mulling a third campaign. “You can’t have Romney. He choked.”

  As for the other establishment favorite, Trump cautioned, “The last thing we need is another Bush. . . . His brother gave us Obama. Abraham Lincoln coming home back from the dead could not have won the election because it was going so badly and the economy was just absolutely in shambles that last couple of months.”

  Trump’s bombast was not off-putting in the least to his audience; it was precisely what they expected. He was a larger-than-life character, someone with whom Americans of all ages had become familiar after decades of his manipulating the media-entertainment complex. At any political venue, in any state, even his best-known rivals needed to introduce themselves—if not by name, then by deed. Trump faced no such barrier to entry. Even though The Apprentice was declining in viewership, its early seasons had been a blockbuster breakthrough, reestablishing Trump’s household name and bolstering his image as a successful executive. He was universally recognized and, increasingly on the right, seen as a kindred spirit, his rants against political correctness resonating more with each passing day.

  To conservatives, the nation’s self-portrait was becoming unrecognizable. Having only just lost the battle over same-sex marriage, merely their latest defeat in the broader culture war, they were fighting on new terrain: Transgenderism, the T in “LGBT,” although it had been broadened to “LGBTQ,” the final letter standing for “Queer” or “Questioning.” (The question gnawing at conservatives was how they’d allowed the left to annex one-fifth of the alphabet in pursuit of social justice.)

  Anyone attempting to wish away the issue couldn’t do so for long. In June 2015, the month Trump would launch his presidential campaign, Vanity Fair revealed its forthcoming magazine cover featuring the Cold War–era Olympic hero formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Having elected to transition and live as a woman, Jenner, once an exemplar of American masculinity, appeared on the cover wearing a revealing corset. The headline: “Call Me Caitlyn.”

  Many conservatives said they were less irked by anyone’s sex change per se than by the rapidly evolving set of rules imposed by polite society. Not only would it be wholly unacceptable to question Jenner’s new look, but the pronoun police stood ready to detain anyone using he instead of she, even accidentally. More bothersome, throughout 2014 and 2015, numerous state legislatures were debating bills relating to transgender bathroom usage, including in K-12 public schools, an issue most Americans could not have imagined reading about just a few years before.

  Trump was better equipped than anyone to tap into this unease. Even as a cosmopolitan moderate on social matters, he possessed an innate understanding of the cultural disquiet gripping middle America and proved remarkably effective at exploiting it. By the time he finished in Des Moines, speaking to a crowd clad in flannel jackets and John Deere caps, the billionaire businessman had earned a standing ovation. “I know what needs to be done to make America great again. We can make this country great again,” he declared. “And I am seriously thinking of running for president because I can do the job.”

  Not that anyone took this proposition seriously.

  “The chances of him running for president are roughly equal to the chances that Earth will be overrun by Ewoks by Memorial Day,” Mark Sappenfield wrote in the Christian Science Monitor after Trump’s speech. “He was there for microphone and the money shots of his legendary hair.”3

  “Donald Trump is doing his tease with the public and media,” Will Rogers, the Republican chairman of Polk County, the state’s largest, told McClatchy at the event.4

  The skeptics were on solid ground. As BuzzFeed reporter McKay Coppins had written in a 2014 piece, “36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail with Donald Trump,” the real estate tycoon had been giving presidential head fakes for a quarter century, using the specter of a campaign to keep his name and company brand in the news with no intention of ever following through.

  Trump had revved up the old routine in time for 2016, visiting some of the early nominating states and making noise about an actual, all-joking-aside campaign. But nobody was buying it. For most of those in attendance, me included, Trump belonged in the same category as Sarah Palin: an “entertainer,” as King said when introducing the reality television personality.

  In fact, this was an insult to the future president. Whereas Trump actually spoke of policy, however fleetingly and unintelligibly, the former Alaska governor delivered a speech that was incoherent bordering on clinically insane.

  “GOP leaders, by the way, y’know the man can only ride ya when your back is bent,” Palin said. “So strengthen it. Then the man can’t ride ya. America won’t be taken for a ride.”5

  At another point, Palin remarked, “When will they let us control our own care? When will they do to stop causing our pain, and start feeling it again? Well, in other words, um . . . is Hillary a new Democrat or an old one? Now, the press asks, the press asks, ‘Can anyone stop Hillary?’ Again, this is to forego a conclusion, right, it’s to scare us off, to convince that—a pantsuit can crush patriots?”

  It was an appalling display from the person whom John McCain had proposed to place one heartbeat away from the presidency. With much of the national media and GOP consultant class assembled in Des Moines for the event, Palin’s crackpot appearance became the talk of the town. Even her staunchest defenders on the right wondered aloud whether something had gone wrong, seriously wrong, for the vice-presidential nominee turned carnival barker.

  CELEBRITY ENTERTAINMENT NOTWITHSTANDING, THE STARS OF THE day were Scott Walker and Ted Cruz.

  Walker, the Wisconsin governor who had crushed the state’s unions (only to survive a recall election in 2012 and then win a full second term in 2014) put to rest doubts about his political skills. He reminded the Republican faithful of a salient fact: While the national spotlight fixated on the GOP’s dysfunction in Washington, its governors and state legislatures were acting as highly effective and fiercely partisan laboratories of democracy, churning out tax cuts, balanced budgets, deregulated state economies, and expanded school-choice programs.

  (Left unmentioned were the party’s more distressing ignominies out in the provinces. This included Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s negligent management of Flint, a once-thriving city placed under state supervision after decades of industrial rot doomed the economy, only for its drinking water to be inadvertently poisoned as the result of a cost-cutting maneuver.)

  Walker gave a spirited and commanding talk, weaving mention of his Iowa upbringing into a tale of his clashes with the left in Wisconsin and the blueprint they provided for reclaiming the White House in 2016. Once viewed by the national political class as too bland to be considered a serious contender, with a single speech Walker had vaulted into top-tier status.

&nb
sp; And then there was Cruz. Nobody arrived in Iowa with higher expectations. Not only had his campaign-in-waiting been working the state hard, recruiting volunteers and hunting for high-profile endorsements, but Cruz’s celebrity had soared during his brief time in Congress. Two years into his freshmen term, the Texas senator had replaced Jim DeMint as the right’s favorite street fighter in Washington, a man whose take-no-prisoners approach made him a hero to the grass roots nationwide. And Cruz had a unique Iowa advantage: Steve King.

  He had worked the congressman hard from the day he arrived on Capitol Hill: long dinners, spontaneous coffees, countless bottles of red wine, even a pheasant-hunting expedition. (“Both of us popped our guns to our shoulders and shot simultaneously as if it were one bang,” King recounted afterward. “That pheasant folded in a cloud of feathers.”) King couldn’t announce his intentions just yet; remaining neutral would allow him to influence the race and build suspense, making his eventual endorsement all the more impactful. But the congressman was all-in on Cruz. Not since Ronald Reagan, King would whisper to his friends and allies, had conservatives seen someone of this talent.

  Cruz was already operating under a strategic theory of the race: It would boil down to an establishment favorite and a conservative challenger. By merging two distinct lanes of the Republican electorate, evangelical Christians and Tea Party populists, behind his candidacy, he could emerge as the consensus anti-establishment candidate.

  Previewing this pursuit, Cruz built his introductory speech to Iowans around paeans to his spirituality (at least a dozen of them) and denunciations of empty rhetoric from his fellow Republicans. “Talk is cheap,” Cruz warned the crowd. “The Word tells us, ‘You will know them by their fruit.’”